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The Third Sophistic
Citation Feibleman, James K. "Presidential Address: The Third Sophistic." Philosophical Topics, vol. 13, no. 2, 1985, pp. 7-18. Summary Feibleman begins with the assertion that "philosophy today is a dead field," and that while philosophy has flourished in universities, it is increasingly insular - it lacks a public presence, and in the university, philosophers only talk amongst themselves. Feibleman attributes this decline to science: "Science has effectively upstaged philosophy and in the same arena. The two disciplines are concerned with the same question of the nature of reality." (7) There are two primary options for how science and philosophy could become closer related: # "The philosophers could try to explain to the scientists what their scientific discoveries meant in philosophical terms. or..." # "...they could try to ascertain what changes in the categories of philosophy were called for by those scientific discoveries." The problem with the first option is that it relegates philosophy to a position of only being able to comment on science. The second option is more feasible, for Feibleman, and he outlines three areas where traditional approaches to philosophy and metaphysics could be changed, in light of scientific discoveries: materialism, the quality of force, and the doctrine of universals. (The detailing of how these fields might change is outlined in the second part of the essay, which I'm electing to skip in this summary.) As philosophy changes direction, Feibleman advocates looking back at the sophists to recover their contributions to philosophy, and outlines three periods of history in which the sophists enjoyed particular prominence. The first sophistic were contemporary with Plato - Gorgias, Hippias, and Protagoras, among others. As Plato presents them, the sophists were concerned with disputation and winning arguments over pursuit of truth; they looked to practice and practical applications of language, while Plato was interested in theory. A second sophistic occurred during the first two Christian centuries - Polemo, Herodes Atticus, Favorinus, Dio Chrysostom, and Nicetes, among others described in Lives of the Sophists by Philostratus. "These philosophers of the second sophistic ... were concerned with form rather tahn substance; they put practical success before truth, and taught oratory rather than metaphysics. Skill in extempore declamations was particularly admired, for it was not what was said so much as how it was said that counted." (13-14) For these thinkers, "The spoken word, even though no record of it was kept, was considered as significant as the written word; and therefore rhetoric was held to be as important as philosophy even though it developed no new ideas. They did not advance knowledge but they did help to found education as a formal discipline." (14) These second sophists were treated as second only to the rulers, and were widely and popularly celebrated, and held to be ideal scholars in their emulation of 4th/5th century Athenian Greeks. Feibleman contends that "we are living in the age of the third sophistic, because it is dominated by philosophers whose main concern is with language." Pointing to philosophers like Wittgenstein and Davidson, the concern with linguistics is a turn to the language of philosophy, not philosophy itself, and concern for linguistic expression over actual content. For Feibleman, "there is no such thing as useless true knowledge. The practicality of a truth, however, is not always self-evident, and its usefulness may take much longer to locate than the truth itself." (16) The use of the second sophistic's work on public speaking has become relevant with the rise of broadcast television over print. But the third sophistic's usefulness doesn't seem productive - "After a splendid start, their work has seemed destined to end in a kind of sterile scholasticism," and to the detriment of the development of philosophy of science (16). Ends with a call for American philosophy to free itself from its deferring to European philosophy, a renewal of American philosophy in the pragmatic tradition.